Radio Interviews:

With WNPR's Faith Middleton on "The Faith Middleton Show," Dec. 3, 2007 (Several interviews in the podcast - Homefront discussion is approximately 2/3 of the way through)

With Blondie and the Viking of TogiNet Radio, Sept. 27, 2007 (*Note: requires Quicktime)

With Tara Crooks of Army Wife Talk Radio, Sept. 6, 2007 (*Note: don't download. Just press the "play" button.)

The following interview was conducted by Storyglossia Editor Steven J. McDermott regarding 2006 Storyglossia Fiction Prize winner  "They Three at Once Were One":

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Kristen Tsetsi: How not this story?

Someone in the military serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is reported dead every day. (According to a recent story I heard on NPR, the average is three a day.) The stories might sadden people a little, they might think, "Oh, no. Not another one . . . ," but then the following story—this year's fashions and how to make sure you're stylin' in the snow—takes over, and the next thing people are thinking about is whether to buy an orange or purple plaid scarf.

And I'm not being accusatory—I've done it, too. It's just the way desensitization works.

And while everyone is thinking about their scarves—and maybe even being angry about the toll war takes—the person whose dead friend or family member or true love was just listed as one of the day's casualties is sitting somewhere shattered (if they even know, yet . . . at that moment, they might be trying to remember whether John was on that convoy, or where in Baghdad he was fighting, and if one of those three might be him). As much as I've heard, "Oh, they know what they're getting into, so . . . "—" . . . so, they've really no right to complain; you get with a soldier, and what do you expect, hmmm?,"—no one knows until they know. You cannot believe your best friend/lover/brother/sister is actually going to die over there. You're pretty sure—you have to hope—that it will be someone else's friend/lover/brother/  sister, if it's going to be anyone.

It was important to me to make people truly understand the fear of not having that reunion, of not seeing that smile one more time or feeling that hand again. Of the thousands of people who sympathize, sincerely, with the effects of war, if they don't know someone fighting, the best they can have is a pretty abstract or imagined understanding. I'm hoping that through Nan—who represents everyone who experiences the constant worry that someone they love could be destroyed at any minute—the people (not the "soldiers," not the "families," but the people) will become more real.

SM: What’s your revision process generally? What surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

KT: When writing short stories, I revise, for the most part, as I go. There'll be a language/punctuation/images/wording check, and then I'll leave it alone until I find a place to submit. Then there's one more read-through with tinkering before sending. I probably won't look at it again until the first rejection comes back, and then it's another read-through before sending.

The surprise that surfaced with regard to "They Three . . . " would have to be that it worked better shorter. In the beginning, it was going to be a much longer story and with two other characters, but then I found a few places I wanted to submit, one of which had a 2,000 word limit. Cutting is sort of a fun personal challenge, so I'll try, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But this one seemed to work—and better.

SM: With its lack of narrative interpretation, your story was nearly unique among contest entrants. You'd previously mentioned to me that you've been working on minimizing explanation in your stories. How have you been approaching that task?

KT: It's become almost habit, now, to keep moving forward (that's how I see a lack of explanation . . . just moving moving moving, whereas proving backstory or inner thoughts or explanation feels like a pause). But when it's not, and when I find myself thinking, "Hmmm . . . I should really put something there to make it crystal clear," I'll remember sitting in workshop with either Alan Davis ( Alone with the Owl, Rumors from the Lost World) or Gordon Jackson ("Billy's Girl," published by Quarterly West and anthologized in Sudden Fiction). Both used Hemingway as an example of how to show and not tell, and the more they directed attention to the technique—the use of body language, dialogue, setting—and to the Iceberg Theory, the more I was intrigued by it. I didn't want to be or write like Hemingway, but I did want to see how little I could tell and still safely say, "Oh, no—it's all right there."

I think I got off track. My approach: Cut cut cut cut. It makes my husband nervous ("How do you just DO that, after you took the time to write it?"), and I used to hate the idea when the necessity of "revisions" were introduced to me in my intro to creative writing class (also with Alan Davis), but it's now one of my favorite things about writing.

SM: The hairspray. Absolutely brilliant. Reveal the dirty secret we writers have; what was your reaction when you first wrote those words?

KT: I sort of cheated. I'd already used a similar idea in Homefront (which tackles the same subject matter as "They Three," but in a book-length version). The main character, during a "bad" time in the course of a deployment, decides beauty in things is useless. You can't own it, can't "have" it, can't make it yours (much like the life of her deployed boyfriend, which she'd like to have enough control over to make it not end, somehow). She spots a geode, sparkling and gorgeous, and has a sudden compulsion to crack the rock into pieces so she can shove the crystal shards into the whites of her eyes. That way, she can have the beauty. (She doesn't do it, of course . . . even if she did, she wouldn't get to see the sparkle unless she looked in the mirror . . . she still wouldn't possess it the way she wants to.)

When I wrote the paragraph about the geode, I was thrilled. It seemed to me an effective way to get across the feeling of needing, so strongly, to possess something utterly intangible that it can drive you almost crazy.

When I wrote the bit about the hairspray, I thought, "Well, it's not rocks in her eyes . . . but it does what I need it to."

SM: Although a war story, "They Three at Once Were One" is really the story less told. What prompted you to present the overlooked viewpoint?

KT: I . . . it's . . . I mean, frustration! That's what made me do it. We have hundreds of books from the soldiers' point of view. And that's great—really. But the soldiers are only half of the number of people who experience emotional and mental effects of deployments.

It's a sticky subject, actually, because it starts to sound like a contest if the ones at home talk about how difficult it is for them. A stock response to their torment becomes, "Oh, shaddap. What, you're having a tough time eating your steaks and waking up to the sound of birds instead of mortar fire? Poor fucking baby."

Yeah.

The thing is, 24-7 worry is extraordinary phychological stress. I've heard women say they got not one full night of sleep for months, and when they did manage to sleep a full night, it was when their boyfriend or husband was home on leave. Some waiting at home start losing their hair, others experience a day of relative—relative—normalcy, and then the next day they're frantic with anxiety and spend hours crying.

For however long the deployment lasts, there is constant, conscious waiting. Waiting for them to come back. Waiting for the phone call or the visitors you don't want. Waiting to not have that weird, hollow feeling for even five minutes. Waiting for mail. For a phone call. Any proof everything is okay, that—for now, at least—the one you're waiting for is alive and safe.

I may get in trouble for this, but my husband (who was my boyfriend when he was deployed to Iraq when the war started) gets it, so, here I go, but with a disclaimer, first: The soldier's story is a hard one. They're the ones who have to worry about getting blown up (or suffering worse fates). They—depending on their specialty—experience extreme conditions, see unimaginable things, and are expected to go on with life as usual. There is absolutely no denying that theirs is a story that needs telling.

However, they also know when to feel safe and when to be scared. They do, to some degree, become acclimated.

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll probably find more books than you can carry in the "Military/War" section that explore the plight of the soldier.

But where are the accounts from the other side? And where are the ones that aren't collections of paragraph-long, non-fiction anecdotes or guides for the military wife? Where are the ones that get inside the person who doesn't know what they'll be feeling from one minute to the next and whether their feelings are "right" or "justified" ("Well, I've no right to complain about the way I feel. John is the one over there, after all, so . . . ")? The ones that don't have a moral to the story, the ones that don't make the focus suddenly-single parenthood or how the family changes with the return of the soldier? Where are the stories that share with you the dirty truths—the jealousy, the selfishness, the anger, the abject fear, the beauty of that kind of torture?

I could go on about this for too many pages.

I wrote the story because these people, the ones waiting, are going through emotional and psychological changes that very closely resemble what soldiers go through (thought obviously in a different way), but they're given little attention because they're not the ones who might be shot.

If a reader who is distant from what war does to both sides develops, through Nan's fear, a greater understanding of a deployment, and gets closer to the war by experiencing it on a personal level, then the Johns and the Mikes and the Joanies with sand in their boots and in their eyes will be remembered as something more than a two-minute news bite. As will the ones you see crying when reporters stuff a fat mic in their face to say, "Tell us about John, who we understand died last week in a battle in Baghdad."

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* as published in the November 28, 2006 blog entry of Steven J. McDermott

Read Steven McDermott's review of the story here.